Dim Sum and Dragon Boats

I've been back training aerial fabric again this month. Liam LeFey, probably the best-reputed male fabric performer in the area was teaching at AirCat, so I went and took his classes for a month. Got some new tricks under my belt, and I'll go to at least one more open workout, but mostly I'm motivated these days to work on Gora Gora Orkestar, a freelance contract I have, and a side project (that is with whatever usable hours I have outside my full-time job). So I suspect I'll have to back-burner aerials again for a bit, but we'll see. I also want to make sure I get some more outdoors stuff in before the fall including at least one camping trip, some more mountain biking, and maybe even some outdoor climbing.

I did some programming mentoring both through AirPair as well as DaVinci Coders this month. I like doing that, and hopefully it's useful. I spent one Sunday up in Fort Collins with Eric Keeney from The Afronauts. We did video editing of my Apogaea circus project, which is now up here: http://youtu.be/4XumnrgLI1E. While the computer was rendering the video, we went for a quick trail ride across the ridge above the reservoir near Eric's house. It was fun. It was also fun to peek into his family man lifestyle and have his younger daughter Rowan hanging around and asking questions. She apparently liked me and asked me to read her a book, which I did.

Last weekend Gora Gora played two gigs on Saturday. First was Orthodox Food Festival in a north Denver neighborhood called Globeville. It was small, but fun and they had booths with homemade food from many cultures that was really fun to sample. The Russian stuff was my favorite. After that gig I went to Casselman's and watched the first half of a circus/burlesque show called "Bohemia: The Forbidden City". It was OK. I had to leave early to get to our next gig, which was at Gary Lee's Motor Club and Grub as part of the Underground Music Showcase. It ended up being a really fun gig and we had a great response from the fans and the club management, so I'm pretty sure they will book us again.

This past Friday we gigged again at the Bohemian Biergarten, which I hope to become our home stomping ground. Really, really fun again this time although our playing was a bit sloppy in the second set, but by that time the audience was pretty drunk and therefore very forgiving. Saturday I went to open workout to work on my 360, ginger drop, and salto. I spent the afternoon coding in my favorite Boulder coffee shop: Atlas Purveyors. I was saddened to learn that they are closing. Today was their last day in business. :-( They had by far the most reliable free wifi of any coffee shop in Boulder. That said, Boulder does seem to have a coffee shop about every 5th store which might be a bit of oversaturation in the marketplace.

Today 5 current Gora Gora members and one alumnus met for dim sum brunch at Star Kitchen. There were some timing, oversleeping, kids don't know how to take care of themselves issues, so the last of our group arrived about 90 minutes after the first of our group. There was also a long wait as this place is very popular. While waiting for a table we got some snacks to tide us over from the asian market in the minimall. The dim sum was worth the wait though. Oh my God so delicious. We feasted on all manner of stuff and when we finally surrendered the bill came to a whopping $12 per person. Delicious and cheap! I plan to go back soon.

We spent the afternoon at the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival and watched some Taiko drumming, some blues music, dragon boat races, and a pop & lock battle. Then it was back home for a quick nap before Gora Gora rehearsal where we polished up some of the vocal tunes we flubbed on Friday.